Saturday, June 29, 2013

TMNT (Vol. 2) #12

Publication date: September, 1995

Story, pencils, inks: Jim Lawson

Letters: Mary Kelleher

Colors: Eric Vincent and Altered Earth Arts

Cover: Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman

“The Escape”

Summary:

A Triceraton ship orbits Earth. Navigation Officer Thrunknor informs the
Commander that they’re in attack range, but that their life support, rations,
manpower and weaponry are almost completely depleted. Regardless, the Triceraton transmitter signal
has begun sounding an SOS and they know precisely where their lost number
is. The Commander soliloquizes that when he and his crew were dispatched to follow the TMNT’s transmat
beam from the Triceraton Homeworld into unknown space, he hadn’t counted on
getting lost for years on end. Even
though they have next to no resources to launch an effective assault, the
Commander is just glad that his mission will finally be over.

Down in DARPA, the Triceraton, the purple alien and the
Chinarian arm themselves. Along with the
Turtles, Braunze, Nobody and Casey, they do some more searching and find Raph floating in a kryo-tube. Grabbing a metal pipe, Leo frees him. Raph's a little the worse for wear but okay, so the group decides to split up and do some recon. Mike, the Triceraton and the Chinarian
inspect a stairwell. As Mike breaks off to look down a hallway, the Triceraton and the Chinarian are attacked by a
group of armed guards. There’s a
firefight and the two aliens blow the humans away. As soon as the Chinarian lets down his
defenses, though, the Triceraton ruthlessly guns him down. Mike comes running back, having heard the
gunfire, but the Triceratron claims that the Chinarian was killed by the guards
in an ambush.

The groups reconvene and Leo says they’ve found an old
bomb shelter that leads to a cave. The
cave ends at a cliff’s edge where a humongous starfish-like monster lurks down
below. Suddenly, the starfish launches a
tentacle that spears Nobody and drags him down into its mouth. Enraged, Casey (still thinking he’s Arnold Schwarzenegger),
sets all of the explosives in Nobody’s discarded duffle bag and hurls them down
into the pit. The explosion injures the
starfish, but causes the cave to collapse, trapping them inside.

Leo spots a crack in the cave’s ceiling and says it’s
their only way out. They climb up
through the hole, only to find themselves on the base’s tarmac, surrounded by
choppers, tanks and hundreds of guards.

*This issue was also published with a back-up story,
“Bog, Part 5 of 5” by Ryan Brown, Chris Allan, Matt Roach, Dave Vance and
Altered Earth Arts.

*This issue also featured a back cover pin-up of Raph,
Don and Mike by Simon Bisley.

Review:

There are a lot of reasons this issue pissed me off, but
I think the unifying factor amongst them is that everything happens so god
damn flippantly.

Let’s start from the beginning. The Triceratons follow the SOS to Earth and
prepare for a wispy, suicide invasion.
That’s cool and all, but the back story is delivered through some
horribly awkward exposition, as the Commander describes the situation to his
Navigation Officer like its fucking news to him. They’ve BOTH been adrift aimlessly in space
for the past few years, waiting to die; the guy didn’t really need a
long-winded reminder. While exposition
is sometimes a necessary evil, there are better ways to get it out there. Maybe an internal monologue or
something? Anything. Just not, “Hey random guy who already knows all
this stuff I’m about to tell you, listen to my preposterously uncomfortable
yarn…”

Then we have the big scene where the Turtles finally find
their long lost brother Raph. He’s in a
tube. They break the tube. “Raph, you okay?” “Sure.”
DONE.

There’s no drama or suspense to it; again, it’s thrown in rather
flippantly. Keep in mind that Raph being
lost was the impetus for this entire arc and the main source of conflict. It’s finally resolved and the Turtles are
reunited,
yet it just occurs in passing. I know
Volume 2 was running out of time due to an early cancellation, but hey, how
about they gave the reunion the time it deserved and cut out a completely bullshit
sequence that didn’t need to happen?
WHICH completely bullshit sequence that didn’t need to happen? Ohhhhh, I thought you’d NEVER ask!

So Nobody dies.
Just like that. No build up, no
dialogue, scarcely any reflection from the characters… just one panel he’s
there, the next he’s dead. I get the
feeling Lawson was trying to use Nobody’s death as a way of illustrating how
high the stakes were; that any character could die at any second without notice
or a minimum of fanfare. But it’s just
so stupid.

Look, if you want to kill off a character to make your
readers stop and say, “Aw damn, shit just got REAL!” then fine. Be that way.
But the death has no meaning to the reader if it means nothing to the
characters. There are a grand total of
two reactions to Nobody’s death; the Turtles saying “shit” over and over again
(one of the few times they swore in this comic) and Casey getting enraged and
trying to blow the starfish up. In
regards to that last one, it might have had the capacity to be a powerful scene
and show just how much Nobody’s senseless death affected the group… if Casey
hadn’t been brainwashed into thinking he was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Instead, Nobody’s death gets folded into a
stupid joke that makes you roll your eyes and the whole sequence just feels
pointless and grating.

It’s not like Nobody was a great character or that I was
really attached to him. But they’d been
doing a lot of work on him toward the end of Vol. 1 and in Vol. 2, like they
were trying to shape him into a worthwhile supporting character. And even though he was little more than background
filler throughout most of Vol. 2, he had a great part during “Shades of Grey” in Vol. 1. And even when his personality during Vol. 2
was amounting to so much cardboard, he was still contributing to the story in
his own unique way (using his police connections to help in the search for
Raph, etc). And I think that’s why it
feels like such a waste to have thrown him out like that. The Mirage Turtles didn’t have a very
impressive collection of supporting characters and Nobody had been improving to
the point of becoming a worthwhile inclusion.
Then he dies a death with less gravitas and impact than the death of the
Chinarian a few pages earlier.

All that and the lack of Talbot’s inking really hurts the
visuals of the issue. Lawson, when inking
himself, leaves way too much empty space, sharp edges and flat, bland, lopsided
facial features. Eric Vincent’s colors
are still good, but Talbot’s inking really made a difference.

Grade: F (as in, “For the love of god, if only Nobody had
put up as much of a fight in the actual issue as he does on the cover, this
might not have been so terrible”.)